A modern society is served by utilities that must function with extremely high reliability. Proper functioning is typically expressed by reliability, availability, and accountability. In order to reliably and efficiently meet growing demands, utilities, such as electric utilities, are developing and implementing technologies to create an intelligent infrastructure, such as a “smart grid” infrastructure for the power grid. In order to realize an intelligent infrastructure, there must be an embedded or overlaid communications architecture by which devices in the network can be securely accessed, controlled, and communicate with each other.
Communications in an intelligent infrastructure, such as the smart grid or other utilities, are affected by numerous events including faults and cyber security threats. For example, many causes of faults on the electrical power line can also impact communication among devices in the network. Thus, transient communication faults, manifested as dropped packets, for example, may be a precursor to an electric power line fault. In addition, cyber security threats, such as spoofing and denial of service attacks, for example, are deployed to disrupt operation, utility operation, and other communications in the utility network. In order to limit the potential damage of a cyber security threat, efforts are underway to enable awareness of potential threat events as well as their impacts in order to harden the utility communication infrastructure both proactively and in response to incidents.
Currently, there are methods and devices that are specifically used to detect the occurrence of a fault in a utility. For example, in an electric power line, most of the methods and devices rely on detection of an abnormal flow of electric current, such as an overcurrent or an undervoltage. There are also various methods being deployed to detect a cyber security threat to the utility network. Efforts to address both faults in a utility network and cyber security threats to the utility network have relied on separate methods and devices.
For these and other reasons, there is a need for embodiments of the present invention.